A CRIME STORY OF DRUGS, ANCIENT VENDETTAS, AND MURDER. PLUS: MINOTAURS.
Glory is your typical twenty-three year old college dropout. She sleeps on her mom’s couch, scores weed for her prudish brother, and is just doing what she can to get by and figure out what she wants from life.
That is, until she’s swept into a centuries-old war between rival immortals.
Oh, and she’s an immortal herself, so THAT’S a thing that happens.
To get to the bottom of a supernatural civil war, Glory has to find a way to kill the unkillable (YEAH, RIGHT), defeat an army of trained assassins using little but her wits (NOPE), and somehow get the drugs to her brother before she cops a possession charge (SHE’S SCREWED), and along the way, maybe save the world (WE’RE PROBABLY SCREWED TOO)….
SEX, DRUGS, and ETERNAL LIFE.
An excerpt:
I’m not my brother’s keeper, but he seems to think I am.
This is the third time he’s sent me for his pot. And why? Because he has a reputation, and I have a history. A reputation is more important for a person with no history, and people with history have no need for reputations, so he says.
How hard is it to find a discreet way to score weed, anyway? It’s not even a damned drug any more. I’ll teach him how to use a fake name and phone number. If he’s this paranoid before he smokes, he’s got shit to work out. He’s a sweetheart, my brother, really, just a dork. You wouldn’t like him. I don’t. Maybe I do.
He exists.
My connection Yoshi is a chill guy, but he’s also the kind of dealer who won’t let you get your shit and go. Has to talk to you about video games, his movie collection, all that. Every visit is one long conversational parade of the things his illicit trade brings him that I could give not one fuck about.
It could be a crush. Can’t rule that out. It’s happened before.
He always tries to give me a sample of his harder stuff, to gateway me. Coke. Acid. Today it’s shrooms in a baggie. Boy must be aching for the day I come in desperate for a fix and willing to do anything for it. I’m pretty sure it’s clear I’m not that kind of girl, but you and I both know this truth never seems to stop that kind of guy.
Then again, Yoshi’s samples have no real price tag. He’s never resentful or acts as if he’s owed. I shouldn’t give him too much shit. I do promise that I’ll come back for more if it’s a good trip, but that’s the only price I pay.
Plus, sell them to your girlfriends who are similarly afraid to talk to another person when said person sells drugs, and you can get your weed for free with the proceeds. Gotta hustle some. There are no free lunches on the island of Manhattan. Free pain, free poverty, and free jail time, but never a free lunch.
His operation exists between two and four in the morning in the back of a small upscale five-and-dime, one I’m not entirely sure the owner knows is open for business at night. Then again, given rents, you never know. There’s a secret knock, then Yoshi comes to the front and lets you in with the key. His setup is the break room, which isn’t really a room as much as it is an expired couch filled with ghost farts that someone hauled in from the street and put against the wall, along with a few crates of glass-bottled sodas stacked to make a basic table. It does feature a bathroom, one of those bleak numbers that uses a broken hook for “privacy.”
Yoshi is a stupid name. Trust me. I know names. He liked the Super Nintendo when he was a kid and it stuck, so now he spits out little egg-sized sacks for coins. It fits. He hasn’t used enough of his own product to fry his brains, but he has used some, it’s obvious, mostly the green stuff.
Presently we’re sitting on the couch and he’s trying to tell me the difference between psilocybin strains, emphasizing how important they are. I’ve heard this speech before about weed, the difference between Diesel and Maui, Gopher or Upchuck, whatever the hell they’re calling varieties these days.
I truck with none of this garbage, because if I ever get to the point where I can tell the difference between one and the other, I’m dropping whatever it is. Doesn’t matter what it is, weed or coffee, if you’re talking about what hints of what it has, you’re trying too damned hard. Coffee’s coffee, weed is weed, a fart is a fart, and don’t try to tell me one’s better than the other. They serve their purpose with or without nuance. That’s why they’re ubiquitous.
He does manage to catch my attention when he pulls out a spore print, strange Rorschach blobs in the shape of a mushroom’s cone. Yoshi tells me this is what he uses to start the grows in something he calls substrate. The substrate itself looks like a jar of beans to me. Maybe it is. I dare not ask. The prints are rather arty in their own way, like a fossil on paper. We sit on his couch checking them out and I start getting interested, truly interested, when the door to the break room flies open hard enough to blow the hair out of my eyes.
Before us stands a dingy, muscular mongrel bastard with a look of kill in his eyes, not the kind of man you want to see in a drug den. He has a smell. Ripe. Not ripe like a good apple. Ripe like kimchi fermented in a dead body.
“Where is the wallet?” he says in a quiet, even tone, at which point I logically conclude that he is bugfuck crazy.
The bathroom door flies open like its sister on the other side of the room and out comes Slim, right on time. Slim is Yoshi’s huge Russian friend. Slim stays in the bathroom and checks his phone, unless, of course, you are peeing. Slim takes some of Yoshi’s money to make sure that no one robs Yoshi. It’s money well spent. I’d wager that so far, Slim’s entire job has consisted of looking askance at people who might cause trouble, maybe growling if things get really intense.
Not so today.
Yoshi makes panicked cartoon-dinosaur noises and gathers his various prints and drugs. He’s genuinely scared. Slim clearly is as well, but he still charges smelly. Me? I freeze. I’ve never been in a situation like this. I have no fucking clue what to do, who to side with, what to grab, or even what sounds to make. Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between strains of psilocybin.
Slim’s first punch is dynamite, a hard enough slab of fist meat against chin to knock anyone unconscious. This is good, except Crazy is still standing. Crazy tongues the inside of his cheek a bit and proceeds toward Slim, who backs toward the bathroom, terrified. If this guy can take that punch, this guy can take Slim, and Slim knows that. Easy math, even for a guy with no GED. Not that I’d cast aspersions. I succeed only at failure.
Crazy holds his ground, seeing Slim’s retreat. Slim wavers between fight and flight, seeing Crazy between him and the door. Yoshi stands. Crazy looks at him. Yoshi sits back down. Crazy looks back to Slim.
“The wallet,” Crazy growls. “Where is it?”
Slim screams and comes in. Crazy executes a neat turn and does something to Slim’s off hand. Slim flips around like a stunt guy in a movie and lands hard, on his back. Dropping, Crazy puts a solid fist into the center of Slim’s chest. Slim starts to flop around like bacon in a pan, clutching where he’s been hit. Bacon, for the record, is a much better nickname than Slim or Yoshi. Or Crazy.
Yoshi draws a wallet from his back pocket and holds it as far from his body as he can, stretching toward Crazy. Crazy moves to take the wallet with laser focus, obsessed. This is a mistake.
Crazy’s belly explodes outward in a chum of viscera. My face, my clothes, every part of me is now crimson filth. Yoshi gets blood rain too. The drugs, the couch, the floor, the ceiling, you really have no idea how much crap flies out of a human when they’re shot in the back and the soft front explodes. And the weird part, dig it, is that Crazy looks down at his open spilled tummy and missing whatever-the-entrails with a look of, I shit you not, irritation. Not anger. Not sadness. Not loss.
Irritation.
Three more shots blow the front of his chest apart, and Yoshi and I, we are sopping rouge. Also the drugs, the couch, et al. I’m not doing the list again. From the floor Slim kicks Crazy’s legs out at the back of the knee. Crazy spins going down, scattering the glass bottles and the crates. His face lands on and shatters several bottles. Slim lays there with the pistol in his hand and a look of amazement at what just happened to go with his dopey fear.
I can’t look, and then I can’t not. Crazy’s face is shredded meat and bottle chunks. Jerking and convulsing involuntarily, he flips to his back and stills, staring blankly at the ceiling with milky dead eyes.
That’s when I realize I am screaming, and also deaf. Pistols in a closed space are fucking loud. Earplugs are for champions. To hell with all of this.
Yoshi and Slim flee having uttered nary a word, abandoning me with the body. I have no idea what I should do. There’s the wallet, on the floor. Somehow it missed the spatter, having dropped behind Crazy as he fell. Yoshi and Slim forgot it, or didn’t care for it, something. Numb and dull, I pick it up, wondering what’s so damned important about this benign thing that a man would walk into an apartment and die without hesitation for it.
Or not.
Crazy has made it to his knees while babbling something liquid and awful, his face falling off in papier-mâché strips. He’s looking at me. I am holding the wallet.
Shit.
I want to react, but brain says no. The last thing I say as the blood rushes from my head is a quiet little dammit, the kind of dammit I reserve for when I have a baggie of mushrooms in my pocket that the cops will find when they tag my corpse.
What will Mother say? What, oh what will my brother do when—
No, you know what? Fuck my brother. Fuck his ear. He sent me here, and I’m about to die for some shitty weed, and I don’t even know if it’s Diesel or Bug Spray or Mellow Shart. He can suck shit.
Selah.